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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23095306">To Watch You Burn</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/pseuds/mr-finch'>mr-finch (soubriquet)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Batman (Movies - Nolan), Joker (2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>AU: oh fuck there's TWO of them, Arthur in Arkham, Arthur in prison, M/M, Misery, Origin Story, straight up heart murder</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 12:42:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,913</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23095306</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/pseuds/mr-finch</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Arthur Fleck becomes the Joker because he's desperate to hold onto one tiny remnant of the only person that ever really cared about him.</p><p>Otherwise known as the AU where Arthur and TDK's Joker grew up together.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Arthur Fleck/Joker (DCU), Joker (DCU)/Joker (DCU)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Anywhere I Lay My Head I Will Call My Home</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>To Watch You Burn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/gifts">SenkoWakimarin</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This horrible little AU was created by @SenkoWakimarin and myself.</p><p>"Highschool AU" we called it, like that meant it would be cute. Oh but it wasn't.</p><p>What you might need to know is that TDK's Joker is referred to as 'Joker' throughout, although his real name is Joseph. He shunned his real name and stuck with the nickname from a young age because that was something he could control. Both he and Arthur grew up in Gotham and briefly ended up at the same highschool together after Joker moved there, which is at some point in the 90s.</p><p>Joker is about three years older than Arthur, and when they meet, Joker's in his final year. They become fast friends despite that, since there are so many similarities about them. When that changes and they admit how they feel about each other, they only have months left before Joker plans to leave Gotham to join the Marines. Anything to get out of that city.</p><p>Joker's father is a lovely homophobic monster by the name of Harold. You'll see pieces of him in here. He threw Joker out, eventually, and Joker ended up living with Arthur and his mother for a little while.</p><p>Oh and Joker sings, sometimes. And Arthur draws. He used to draw Joker over and over again.</p><p>Hope you're well and truly prepared.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Arthur is sixteen years old when Joker leaves for the military.</p><p>They had known that time was coming for months. Waiting became its own form of torture as they grew closer, first shy and then desperately bold as the calendar counted down. Arthur holds these memories in his heart (and on paper) deep enough that they will never leave, even after what happens later.</p><p>After six months have passed and he’s just spent Christmas as a sophomore, Penny tells him that she met a lovely man that day with a handsome laugh and such interesting things to say. Such wild funny tales about his old friend Joker.</p><p>And he clutches the cutlery a little harder as he asks her, now what was he saying exactly? What were the words that she could remember? And she just smiles and holds a hand in front of her mouth and says, Happy, you know what he was like.</p><p>And Arthur finds himself waiting at the end of the block for Joker’s father to come back from work, the heavy flashlight a solid weight in his small hand, and Harold doesn’t look half so handsome or flash quite such a winning smile with his head half-cracked on the sidewalk and his foot still crushed into the door of the car.</p><p>Arthur knows what’s coming. Arthur has been feeling it call him for seven months now.</p><p>They try him as an adult. The judge wants to be fair, but given that Arthur refuses to explain why he did it and that Harold is still doing poorly in recovery, there is no such thing as just turned seventeen. Arthur gets three years for aggravated assault. It’ll tick off the rest of his teens until he’s twenty: tick, tick, tick, nice and clean.</p><p>It turns out you can be forwarded your mail in prison. When the letter arrives from Joker, Arthur holds it in his hands like it’s made of glass and he wouldn’t care if it shattered him. It’s the first contact they’ve had since he left. Arthur had thought, in the way his mind crept sometimes, that he would never hear from Joker again.</p><p>He writes back. His left-handed chicken scratch scrawl is poor, but he takes his time to make sure it’s legible. He writes about where he is and what he’s doing and he doesn’t say what he’s done. He draws for the first time since he was shut off from his sketchbooks: the view from the prison yard and quick silhouettes of the other men. None of them distinct; none of them interesting. Just shadows on tarmac.</p><p>He trades favours for cigarettes and cigarettes for commissary. Stamps are worth any price and Arthur is long used to providing his body as payment. He makes a pretty penny. Enough to get paper and pencils and do something with his time other than waste it.</p><p>He barely ever draws people, though. This really is not the place for that.</p><p>The letters to Joker are a lifeline Arthur didn’t know he needed. He begins to live for them, floating from week to week just with the hope of receiving them. Joker is still in training and has time for it - time for him - and Arthur in jail has nothing but endless time.</p><p>It makes him behave. It means that Joker might just, one day, come back.</p><p>Joker aces boot camp with flying colours. Then he aces SOI and his MOS. Of course he does. Arthur is proud, writing sloppy letters that ooze praise in a mildly self-conscious but increasingly adult manner. He is not the shy boy that Joker left behind. He is something else, morphing into somebody else.</p><p>It cannot last. It doesn’t. Joker’s training ends sometime into the beginning of Arthur’s second year in prison and that means his letters start taking a little longer to get to him. He can’t share as much about what’s going on, either, and Arthur starts to get the impression that if sitting down to write means an hour of introspection, Joker would rather avoid it.</p><p>He gets that feeling. He’s been encouraged to keep a journal by the one psych-slash-quack-slash-doctor they have in the place, who drip-fed Arthur suggestions over thirty-five minutes like he was enjoying how Arthur drank it all up. So he writes. When Arthur isn’t on work duty, he’s sitting, smoking, needing to smoke, or he’s sitting carving thoughts into his journal.</p><p>He limps through his second year in jail with only the smallest of incidents blackening his spotless record.</p><p>The third year isn’t so kind. Arthur knows every square inch of the place and the walls huddle so close it makes Gotham feel like open ocean. He longs to be back there, swimming, or out there, somewhere. Wherever he’s lucky enough to be stationed: where the officers drop him off and leave him. Where he…</p><p>Where he can…</p><p>He loses track of his thoughts these days, sometimes.</p><p>Arthur tries not to be angry in his letters. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. He’s stopped drawing cement landscapes and gone back to people, though they’re only shades of the people around him. The man with the shaved head who punches a guy so many times the guy stops looking like a guy. The look of the guy after, like a deflated punch bag.</p><p>Himself laughing. He laughs more often these days. Most of the inmates leave him alone when he does, since he proved it won’t be stopped by violence. It only irritates them to the point of action when it can’t be muffled in the middle of the night. When his chest aches from the spasms and his voice cracks and somebody says shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up, and somebody else says, silence the fucking clown.</p><p>That’s how he ends up in the medical wing. Twice. Then solitary, for his own protection. Arthur laughs and laughs at the thought of protection.</p><p>He does to the guy who takes his journal what he did to Joker’s father. He’s older now, his arms wirier. He doesn’t look it, but he’s strong even though he stopped growing upwards long ago.</p><p>And you don’t really need anything but the strength of wild desire to cave a guy’s head in. To sink your teeth into their hand when they try to stop you and thrash until you are holding part of the hand.</p><p>Arthur remembers the taste of someone else’s blood on his lips like a dream as they pull him away.</p><p>Arkham Asylum is better than prison. For one thing, the other patients make so much more sense. Arthur gets a new psych-slash-doctor-slash-creature and this one is female; older than him, but young enough that it’s fun to see her. He suspects this is the case for most of her other clients and that twists something about her.</p><p>He doesn’t trust her. Even if she lets him write his letters in their sessions and takes them off to post for him later. Even if she’s the one managing his pills - new things, white and bitter - and focusing on making him <em>well.</em> Arthur doesn’t trust anyone who gets paid to look after him.</p><p>Joker’s replies mean less, when they arrive. They are longer and they have many more words, but no matter how long Arthur spends reading he just ends up stuck on the same lines over and over again. </p><p>
  <em> Arthur, will you come lay up here with me? </em>
</p><p>When they let him back out into the city, some time later, the cold air and the wind is far harsher. Arthur has gotten used to stale aircon and still rooms. He doesn’t know how to dress for Gotham’s winter.</p><p>Lucky for now it’s only fall, and he can stay in the corners of the parks when night rolls around. He knows the time of day by when he stops jonesing for a cigarette, because other night-time park patrons always have them.</p><p>When the snowfall gets so thick he can’t sleep through the shivers, he makes his way back to Penny’s apartment. She’s still there, just smaller and frailer, and she puts her arms around him when he comes in.</p><p><em>My boy,</em> she says, and Arthur can’t explain why that makes him feel like crying.</p><p>There’s a stack of mail on his bed. Some from before he went away and some since he left Arkham. Arthur thumbs through the letters, his dry fingers sticking on a thicker package and pulling it out.</p><p>There’s a tape inside. Just a tape. No name or return address, but the handwriting on the envelope is so familiar.</p><p>He slides it into the cassette player on his desk: the one Joker had brought round, one day, and refused to take back again. The one that played them Johnny Cash and Tom Waits until the tapes spooled out black reels. The one they would listen to together, curled up in bed.</p><p>It’s soft static, no music. Then, the faintest melody.</p><p>Arthur plays the tape over and over. It’s night, but then it’s morning, and he still hasn’t stopped listening. It’s the quiet understanding; the stark recognition. Joker’s voice, scratchy with use, sings tunes that Arthur had half forgotten until he remembers them again.</p><p>Arthur decides that he doesn’t want to go back to Arkham.</p><p>He goes to the pharmacy to collect his medication. He goes to interviews until he gets a job. It’s dishwashing in the most back-end of back-end diners, but the boss doesn’t care about his criminal record and is hiring half his staff under the table. Arthur earns money and starts buying groceries, falling back into the apartment routine and cooking meals again.</p><p>Penny is pleased. She’s his mother, but not so much his mother that he feels he can call her <em>mother,</em> here in the privacy of his own head. He still remembers what she said about Joker.</p><p>The old images are the memories he collects. They remind him of the person he used to be. He stores all the letters he still has in a plastic wallet, safe, and when he writes back it’s closer to the old Arthur again.</p><p>Not shy. No, not shy anymore. But Arthur.</p><p>He gets two years of that. Two years of semi-regular letters, carving a small place in the world and something approaching the televised version of happiness.</p><p>He’s so on top of life that it takes him a little longer to notice that Joker’s letters have stopped returning. Or maybe it doesn’t; maybe he feels it anyway and lurches away. Because Arthur has left Joker waiting for longer and it’s time to have some patience, maybe.</p><p>Three months of silence is when he stops sleeping.</p><p>One month more and he loses his last job. The next are a failed series of interviews that come close to patrons calling the police. Arthur just laughs when they threaten him and lets himself out. He is a ghost in the wind and they are just sirens.</p><p>Penny seems to know that he’s slipping closer to Arkham. He can feel it calling sometimes, in the nights when he can’t sleep. Asking him when he’s coming back.</p><p>Arthur doesn’t want to go back, but he stops taking the pills.</p><p>There’s a moment, high on the fumes of withdrawal, when Arthur writes out a ten page letter that goes into more detail than he’s ever known about how much he wishes they’d had their time together, and how missing him has been worse than missing anyone else he’s ever had the torment to know, and that he’s always loved him.</p><p>He doesn’t expect a reply to that one either, but it doesn’t stop him from mailing it out as soon as the post office opens. They know him - light eyes and dark circles - and Arthur tells them, this is it, this is the last one, as he kicks a dent in the door and a spiral of glass falls and breaks.</p><p>Why not come back to Arkham? The very same nurses are still here. The therapist is different; the wards are the same, just with newer names. Positive and reinforcement and behaviour and cognition. </p><p>He takes his newest pills and smiles. He rarely laughs. He thinks, if he laughed, it would be hollow. Like the hole in the back of his mouth where medical pulled out a tooth or the hole in his stomach that whistles when he breathes.</p><p>They didn’t let him bring his tape, so he doesn’t have the comfort of Joker’s thin voice. Probably, they don’t even have the right machine. Arthur has seen a few of the little finger-sized MP3 players among the staff. One of these days, he wants to hear one play right into his ear.</p><p>But the structure suits him. It always does. Time goes by like wind in a meadow. Outside the windows, kids play on the tracks of the old railway line.</p><p>It’s tough to know where he is when Arthur is released. He knows how to behave in this world and he has his pills, but he doesn’t remember who he was ever meant to be. There’s enough heartbreak left in him, after he gets home and plays that tape one more time, that he writes a letter to Joker’s commander to find out when exactly he was killed in action.</p><p>It’s what the commander writes back: a perfunctory letter with an official stamp and a clear signature, with a note that translates to <em>discharged, no forwarding address</em> and underscores <em>have no record of your contact details,</em> that causes something in Arthur to fracture.</p><p>He holds it in place - a hanging arm - for several weeks, as he moulds himself around his newest job and keeps on buying his prescription. It just takes one ill-advised ride on the bus through Joker’s old neighbourhood for it to fall off his body and snap.</p><p>Maybe, Arthur thinks, in his first coherent thought in months - if Joker doesn’t exist anymore, if he saw fit to disappear into the air, then what Arthur needs is his very own version.</p><p>He takes the paint home from a store the next day and spends the evening working. By the next morning, he has a palette mask across his face that won’t ever - no matter what the world and everyone does - stop laughing at them. But this, he thinks, holding his cheeks high and wide, isn’t quite right. Not yet, anyway. Joker is actions more than art. Joker has attitude.</p><p>He swaggers into the club that night, all fancy footwork and a real genuine grimace on his face. Gay is never a word he’s chosen; he’s never picked any words. He just lets himself be carried by the crowd until he’s right in the middle, dancing (screaming), fucking dancing and then he’s with someone and it’s not fucking sacred. It’s just painful and dirty and half-meant, and he stops before either of them can finish.</p><p>The guy punches him, like it’s funny. Like if he hits him hard enough he’ll sag like a punctured balloon; like it’s worth doing just in case it hurts. Like how Arthur, blood streaming from his nose, knows that this man won’t ever go to jail.</p><p>The laughter spills out of him like arterial blood. It shrieks and breaks like the hole in his heart and doesn’t stop until the guy has left him curling in the trash bags at the back of the club. When he realises exactly what’s so funny.</p><p>There’s no war in Gotham. Just friendly fire that keeps on coming.</p><p>Arthur takes his Joker back home and sits with it for days, weeks, and simmers.</p><p>It’s inevitable that he slips back into old ways, but this time it’s different. Arthur doesn’t care what he does this time, doesn’t try to hide, and the people looking for it see it in him. </p><p>He’s picked up, after one particularly rich asshole almost hits him in his Porsche and Arthur just climbs up onto the bumper and starts whaling on it. Some other rich asshole in a van pulls up beside them and barrels him in, taking him to a terrible neighbourhood and telling him what they want from him.</p><p>Arthur laughs and agrees before they tell him they’re paying. It really is the least he can do.</p><p>So what if there is no Joker that he remembers out there? So what if he’s left, and moved on, and ridden out of Gotham as fast as he can like he always wanted? Arthur doesn’t need him or anyone. He can make his own. He has made his own.</p><p>He’s good at what he does. One of the best. His bosses call him their clown, because of the laughter. Arthur likes to paint his face in private and see if it matters.</p><p>He’s the kind of dog you let out of the cage once all the others have slipped the leash and ran away, squealing. He’s the only one that has no morals, that goes after assholes in fast cars or idiots with fists and doesn’t care about money. No, not at all about money, or vengeance or rage. Arthur’s violence is worse than anything in the world that could cause it.</p><p>It really is the best joke. His friend would’ve been so proud, if he knew. Instead, Arthur is proud for both of them, proud of himself for doing so well. He knows he makes a really good Joker.</p>
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